Final Blow

STORY / GAMEPLAY
This is a sports game, so the actual story (goal) is to win! You choose a boxer and participate in one-off matches or enter a tournament to knock out everyone and become the World Champion. Apart from the Single Player mode, the game also supports two players versus mode (which is fun). There are 10 available boxers to choose from, but none seems to carry special features in his own individual way. There are five different punches to master: the upper cut, the swing punch, the low and high long punches and a lean-back jab. The boxing defense includes ducking, jumping (!) as well as shuffling forward and backwards. When the timing is ideal, you can unleash a final blow punch which can sometimes knock-out (KO) the opponent in a single strike. Overall, Final Blow is a good looking game though its gameplay is rather flat since all you have to do is to just hit the joystick's fire button as many times as possible and at the same time avoid a few hits. In this boxing game, it's easy to progress further in the championship so the difficulty level is quite fair! Leaving the "boredom" aside, the game is beautiful, especially on the 16bit versions.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Amiga version keeps some nice details from the original coin-op version but in general it looks like a port from the Atari ST, differing in the action's pace which is much faster and smoother. The sprites are huge and nicely detailed while the backgrounds are vivid, including the fighting area (the ring) and the spectators around. The animation feels a bit "jerky" though, which is a let-down from this, otherwise respectable, boxing game. Final Blow's sound is good, featuring some nice sampled boxing sound effects (the ST version includes some of them as well) and a nicely composed main menu music tune.